


1. The North Star

by DiAnima



Series: Animus Vox: Book 1 [2]
Category: Runescape (Video Games)
Genre: Baby Lyra's First Appearance, Gen, after murdering some dudes of course, chaos fam, daemonheim, ft. Wilderness Lads, in which Moia impulsively steals a sister
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-10
Updated: 2018-11-10
Packaged: 2019-08-21 18:47:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16582040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DiAnima/pseuds/DiAnima
Summary: Moia, on a mission in the depths of the Wilderness, finds something unexpected.





	1. The North Star

**Author's Note:**

> A note on the timeline I'm using:  
> I've stretched out the canon timeline a fair bit to make it fit the story I want to tell. This first chapter is set four years after the Battle of Lumbridge/World Event 1, which was only a few months after the beginning of the 6th age. The 5th age 'adventurer' was killed during The World Wakes and never got to fulfil her destiny as a World Guardian. (see the Prologue)  
> Luckily for Gielinor, something else has come along instead.  
> 

An ash storm brewed in the Forinthry sky. Moia squinted at it from beneath her facemask. Black clouds boiled against the constant, dull, low-hanging grey, rolling in from the north - down from the coast. She still had some time before it posed any danger to her, she judged. An hour or so at the least. Enough time to finish her mission.

 

She crouched on a ridge and looked down over a gully between two hills, too shallow and too bleak to be a valley. Her cover was a dense patch of skeletal, spiky brush. It was enough to obscure her figure from the camp pitched down below. A bandit camp. She’d been tracking this band for several days as they made their way south-east, away from the volcano. They were going too far east. She was here to turn them back before they found anything she didn’t want them to see.

 

She raised her spyglass to her eye and examined the camp again. Between thirty and forty blades, men and women. Ten were on watch, at various points around the border. Heavy brutes, paired up for protection. The rest were going about their business between the rough tents. Her spyglass drifted, found the largest tent, right in the middle. Before it blazed a firepit, complete with a cauldron of something bubbling, tended to by a pair of lighter warriors. Her gut tightened at the sight of it. She hadn’t eaten since the day before.

 

_No. Focus._

 

She would wait for the storm. It would be a waste of energy to engage them in the open. Now their camp was pitched, she could wait a little longer.

 

She set down her glass and stared down at the camp, committing its layout to memory. If she was to attack in the storm, she would need to know her way through it by heart. She knew these northern ash storms. She knew she would be working blind.

 

Unexpected movement caught her eye. She blinked and sat up straighter. A group of three, striding between the tents in tight formation. Moia looked through her spyglass again and frowned when she saw them clearer. These weren’t bandits. They were taller. Stronger. Better fed. They wore no worn scraps of fur and metal but armour and heavy cloaks - one had his hood down, he was a redhead - and the one walking at his side seemed to be wearing mage robes.

 

Their leader, in a black cloak with grey fur trim, strode on with certainty. He ignored the curious looks he and his companions were attracting. They were following one of the bandits towards the central tent.

 

Traders? No. No traders with any sense came this far north. And their dress wasn’t Fremennik. Probably hunters, then. One of the foolhardy bands of southerners who crossed the border in search of adventure and glory.

 

They vanished into the tent, leaving Moia to wonder what they were doing there. She distracted herself by watching the approach of the storm.

 

She grew restless. Her palms itched. She summoned a few little glyphs in her hands to ease it, breathing deep and slow. _Not much longer._

 

Movement again, and she snatched up her spyglass. The three strangers reappeared. They saw how close the storm was - thick, dense, rearing up into the sky in an impossibly tall cascade, the outer clouds whirling with ferocious winds, the top edge already blanketing the northern half of the sky - and moved quickly to leave. Moia watched them go.

  
Then she saw something that made her freeze.

 

They were no longer a three. The redhead was carrying something - someone - on his hip. The little figure was half-shrouded in his cloak, so Moia nearly didn’t see it, but it moved when her spyglass passed over them and there -

 

A child, a brown-skinned human child with a wild tangle of curly black hair. They looked up at the storm, peeking out from under the redhead’s cloak, and then let it fall across them again, shrouding them from view. Moia couldn’t tell if they were a boy or a girl at this distance.

 

She went cold. She snapped her spyglass shut. She nearly leapt up - ran after them - killed the men where they stood -

 

 _No_. She had a mission to complete. She had to focus. She could follow them after. She sat back on her heels and mastered her fury.

 

The hunters left. The bandits settled down to wait out the storm in their tents.

 

The wind dropped, leaving a silence, a stillness, in its wake. The first flakes of ash began to fall. Moia held out a hand and caught a flake in her palm. Almost like snow.

 

She struck when the shrieking wind reached its loudest and the thick swirling ash filled the air so densely that no light could penetrate it. It masked her approach and whisked away the screams as she worked.

 

She saved her fury. She didn’t need it, not yet. Best to be cold. Passionless. Drawing her power from rage gave her strength, but it was exhausting. No need for it just yet.

 

She found the leader of the band and, bloodsoaked, searing with energy, asked him about the child. When he refused to answer she showed him a little more of her power and asked a little less nicely. This time he saw sense and told her - they had found her alone near the volcano crater, two day’s west from here, there had no idea where she came from but the warriors paid well, they knew nothing about her - _please_ -

 

She killed him and waited out the rest of the storm in his tent, cleaning herself up as best she could. When the wind died, she went out and picked the four most gruesomely killed men whose bodies were at least recognisably human and hung them up, one at each corner of the camp. It was a warning. One for any bandits who tried to push further east - for anyone who tried to reach the peninsula.

 

She left the camp and retrieved her pack from where she had buried it, safe in the ash by a distinctive rocky outcrop. She drew her cloak around her and pulled up her mask, then paused and thought. The party she had seen leaving the camp had gone south. Any trace of their tracks had been obliterated by the storm, but she set off in the same direction. She kept half her focus on her footsteps. With the rest, she searched the air to the south, as far as she could reach, searching for any living human mind alight in the wasteland.

 

Hours passed.

 

She caught the first whisper of their thoughts after nightfall. The presences grew stronger as she continued to walk. They must have pitched camp for the night, and now she was  finally catching up with them. She walked on.

 

Their camp came into view. A few tents pitched in the shadows of a ruin. Perhaps it had once been an old palace, or an ancient temple. All that remained of it were two uneven rows of tall black pillars, some standing alone, some branching inwards into the broken beams of a high, vaulted ceiling. The structure stood proud out of the ash like the broken ribcage of a long-dead titan, surrounded by smaller patches of rubble and copses of skeletal trees.

 

Their fire was small and partially hidden by the dark canvas of their tents, vague, flickering, casting orange and amber light up against the black pillars. Two shapes sat up by the light, enveloped in thick cloaks. Moia hesitated when she counted them. Where was the third man? And where was the child?

 

She called up a glamour, pulled down her mask, and walked up to the firelight.

 

‘Hoy, there,’ said the smaller figure, standing to meet her and levelling a loaded crossbow at her chest. ‘Hold back, or die.’

 

It was the redhead. He seemed young, his pale face fresh and free of scars, his cheeks dusted with freckles. From the elbow down, his right arm was a silver-green prosthesis - a complex arrangement of interlocking metal parts engraved with runes and pulsing faintly with blue light. The tip of his crossbow bolt glistened in the firelight. Poisoned, no doubt.

 

Moia raised her hands. She picked an accent at random, and said with the quiet lilt of a Taverley native, ‘I saw your light. No harm meant, stranger.’

 

‘You alone?’ said the other figure, the man in the black cloak. He sat smoking a pipe by the fire, apparently unworried by the appearance of a stranger.

 

‘Yes.’

 

‘Hungry?’

 

‘If you have spare.’

 

The man in black chewed thoughtfully on the stem of his pipe. The redhead shifted his stance, his metal hand closing around the trigger of his crossbow with a barely-audible whir.

 

‘We have spare,’ said the man in black, and gestured for Moia to sit by the fire. She did so, and the redhead joined them, setting his weapon on the ground within grabbing distance. Moia was wary but tried not to let it show. She had been expecting a fight. Some sort of hostility. Not to be invited to their fire - to be invited to share their food!

 

They didn’t ask her who she was or what she was doing alone in the north. She didn’t ask them, either. She ate the bowl of stew they offered her and listened as the man in black and the redhead talked. The redhead was from Misthalin, she gathered as she listened. His sister was getting married in the summer, and he didn't approve of the match, but who was he to argue, the man had money and their farm had been struggling these past few winters, what with all the battles and the raiding...

 

The third man appeared from inside one of the tents, and the man in black switched languages to address him - from the common tongue of the west to a dialect Moia couldn’t name. She understood snatches of it. Something about a girl, about her sleeping. Moia had to hold still when she understood that, but she began to grow restive. They had the child. Why? Who was she? What did they want with her?

 

A little piece of Moia’s reason berated her for her sentiment. Who was she to be concerned about one child, seen for a moment in the middle of a mission? Who was she to care? She ought to leave. She ought to put the matter out of her mind and return home, where her family was waiting for her.

 

Reason struggled against sentiment. Sentiment, in a rare burst of strength, won.

 

‘I wouldn’t have come up,’ she said cautiously, in a lull in the conversation, ‘But I saw you three earlier. Before the storm.’

 

They all looked at her sharply.

 

‘At the camp, north of here. The bandit settlement. Am I right?’

 

The man in black _hmphed_. ‘That you are.’

 

‘I saw you leave with a child.’

 

The leader of the little band regarded her and drew on his pipe. Moia held his gaze. He was old, for a wilderness hunter. One side of his face was a white ruin of burns and narrow scars. The other was a few shades darker, rugged, wrinkled, hard with suspicion. One brown eye watched her with sharp intelligence.

 

‘I don’t know what kind of people you might think we are,’ he said. He had a distinct Asgarnian accent. ‘But the child is safe with us. We’re taking her south, to the border. There’s a monastery in Edgeville that takes in foundlings. She’d die out here, otherwise.’

 

‘You paid for her,’ said Moia.

 

‘I know how to speak with these bandit clans. You don’t get to my age out here if you don’t know the value of a few well-placed coins. Who’s she to you, anyway?’

 

Moia paused. Her glamour was of a tall and well-built woman, the sort of warrior someone might not be surprised to find north of the border, but these three men were wary. They might try to kill her if she threatened them. She wasn’t afraid of that outcome but it would be bothersome.

 

‘An interested party,’ she said.

 

The redhead barked a laugh. ‘Try again,’ he said, laying a hand on his crossbow again.

 

The third man, the one who had appeared from the tent nearby, stood watching with his arms folded tight across his chest. Moia glanced up and looked at him properly for the first time - to her surprise, she faintly recognised him, though for a moment she couldn’t say why. There was nothing special about his face - pale and dark-haired, his cheeks ruddy with the wind, a straggly dark beard clinging to his chin. His long coat was dusty, encrusted with ash. Under it, he wore the thick armoured robes of a travelling mage. A glint of metal on his hand caught her eye and then she saw his gauntlets. Silver and black, the tips tapered into some approximation of claws. She knew the design. Her quartermaster had given them out at her command, only a few years ago. Rewards for favoured warriors.

 

‘You were at the Battle of Lumbridge,’ she said, and the man blinked at her. She tried to guess his age. He didn’t seem old - he couldn’t have been more than thirty. He would have been in his early twenties, at the most, at the time of the battle. Would he remember her?

 

He straightened up and dropped his hands to his sides, noticing her interest in his armour. ‘I was.’

 

‘On the losing side.’

 

‘Yes.’

 

‘And you’ll let them take a foundling to a Saradominist settlement?’

 

He shrugged. ‘Not your business.’

 

For a breath she could only stare. Then, in a rush, Moia hated him. No doubt a mercenary, drawn to the battle by promises of riches and glory - not a true follower, not one who wanted her Lord’s triumph - but someone who abandoned them as soon as they were struck with one setback.

 

She got to her feet and dropped her glamour. ‘Do you remember me, soldier?’

 

The redhead cried out in surprise and jumped up with his crossbow. The man in black choked on his pipesmoke and gave several dry, hacking coughs in the silence. The mage she was addressing blanched. She saw one of his gauntleted hands seize the handle of a wand strapped to his thigh - but he didn’t draw it.

 

‘Do you remember me?’ she said, harder.

 

‘I remember, General,’ said the mage. He dropped his hand from his wand. ‘I remember.’

 

His eyes were hard. He didn’t look away. He didn’t defer. Moia’s hand itched with heat - for a moment she wanted to attack him, to punish him for his disrespect, for his disloyalty - but that would be a waste of energy.

 

_No. Save it for when it matters._

 

Moia drew herself up and said, with all the command she could muster, ‘I’m here for the girl.’

 

‘I don’t suppose you’re giving us a choice, witch,’ said the man in black. He stood up with a grunt and a sigh. His size surprised Moia - he seemed to unfold in a series of many smaller movements until he reached his full height.

 

‘Not if you wish to keep your lives.’

 

The redhead trembled with anticipation, teeth bared in a defiant snarl. Moia could hear the metal of his fingers rattling against the wooden stock of his crossbow. The mage noticed too, and said sharply, ‘Stand down, Rowan, you wouldn’t live to fire a second shot.’

 

Then the mage turned away and went back to the tent. The redhead snapped something obscene at him as he went but the mage ignored him. The man in black watched Moia. To her surprise, he was smiling. 

 

‘He told us about you,’ said the man in black. ‘Moia, the rift-mage, right hand of Zamorak.’ He mimicked the fussy accent of a landed southern lord. ‘Pleasure to make your acquaintance, witch.’

 

Moia said nothing. The quiet stretched out, over the hissing of the wind through the dead trees and the low crackle of the fire. Something barked twice, some way off in the forest, and then fell silent.

 

The mage re-emerged from the tent and in his arms was the child. The girl was asleep. She was smaller than Moia expected, and warmer - far warmer. Moia took her and held her on her hip, like the mage had done, and let the girl’s head rest on her shoulder. For a moment Moia didn’t dare move. A flush of fear ran through her - fear of disturbing her, of breaking her with the strength Moia knew she possessed - but the men were still watching her, so she stood tall and took a moment to give each of them a piercing look.

 

None of them spoke. None of them looked away.

 

Moia turned away from their camp and walked away from the firelight. Once she judged she was at a safe distance, she muttered the familiar incantation and reality tore easily before her. She stepped through the portal to home.

 

Her family were waiting for her in the main hall but she ignored them and marched off to her quarters. The heavy door unlocked at her touch and she kicked it shut behind her. She gestured with her free hand and the lamps flickered on, and there she paused, and took a deep breath.

 

To her relief, the girl hadn’t woken. _What am I supposed to do when she does?_

Moia cautiously looked down at her. Questions arose, one after the other in quick succession.

 

_Who is she? How did she end up alone in the north, alone in the Wilderness? Was she abandoned - left for dead?_

_By_ who _?_

Anger rose in her chest at the thought. _If I ever find out, I_ _’ll kill them_.

 

There was no point dwelling on it. The others were still waiting for her to explain herself.

 

She put the girl down on the bed and tucked the furs around her - it was warm down here, but the girl was barefoot and the shift she wore was ragged and thin. Once she was certain the girl had settled, Moia left her. She quietly locked the door and went back to the throne room.

 

They were still waiting. Zamorak stood before his throne and Bilrach was at his side.

 

‘Well?’ said her Lord.

 

Moia bowed to him. ‘The bandits are dead. I left a warning. We won’t be disturbed by anyone from the west for a while.’

 

Zamorak nodded, satisfied.

 

Bilrach spoke before his god could continue. ‘And you bring back a …’

 

He trailed off, apparently too disgusted to finish the sentence.

 

‘A human child, Bilrach,’ said Moia.

 

‘ _Why_?’

 

‘I chose to,’ said Moia, before she could let herself think about it too much. ‘She stays.’

 

Bilrach stared at her like she had gone mad. ‘You cannot keep her! She will be a nuisance.’

 

‘I will keep her, and she won’t be.’

 

‘She will get underfoot!’

 

Moia glowered at him. ‘Then learn to watch where you step.’

 

‘This is absurd-’

 

‘If you expect me to stand by as a little girl is put in danger by stronger men, you have judged me wrong, Bilrach. She _stays_.’

 

Bilrach looked to Zamorak for help. Moia glanced up too. He seemed amused, hands folded in front of him, a faint inscrutable smile on his face.

 

‘Humans put each other in danger all the time, Moia,’ he said, quiet and measured. ‘Hundreds - thousands - of little girls are put in danger every day. What possessed you-?’

 

‘One less, tonight,’ Moia snapped. She stared into his scarlet fire without flinching, and stood her ground.

 

 _You will be given nothing._ He had taught her this years ago. _Life will give you nothing, and neither will I. You must take what you want and hold onto it with all your might._

 

‘As long as she earns her keep, I have no objections,’ he said after a short silence. Bilrach sputtered something indignant but Zamorak waved it away. ‘We have taken human allies before, Bilrach,’ Zamorak reminded him. And then, to Moia - ‘If you wish to raise her, I see no reason why not. As long as she earns her keep, and causes us no trouble.’

 

Moia relented and, at last, looked away. ‘She’ll be useful, my lord, I’ll make sure of it.’

 

‘Good. We have better things to argue about.’

 

Later, much later, after she’d washed off the ash and dried blood, after she’d devoured the remains of the last loaf of bread she’d brought down from the surface, after she’d curled up to sleep, Moia half-woke in the softly lit darkness. The girl was still sleeping, just across from her, one arm up on the cushion under her head. Moia frowned. There was a pale patch on the girl’s skin - pink-white against brown on the inside of her forearm, no more than an inch or so across. A burn? Gently, Moia reached out and touched it. It wasn’t rough, not like a scar. It seemed the same as the rest of her, apart from the colour.

 

Moia brushed the girl’s hair back off her face. _I need a name for you_.

 

For several breaths, nothing came to her. She closed her eyes and let herself drift.

 

And then she had it, and she smiled.

 

Lyra - after the brightest star in the northern sky, the star travellers used to navigate their way through the dead wastes. Yes, that would do.

 

 _Lyra_.


End file.
